Is Eaton Arrowsmith the right school for your child?

Eaton Arrowsmith School (EA) has helped students with learning disabilities in Vancouver, White Rock and Redmond, Washington for more than 12 years.

EA uses the Arrowsmith Program, a method developed by Canadian educator and author, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young. It’s based on the principle of neuroplasticity, which says that the brain can be strengthened through a series of targeted activities.

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The school was founded by Howard Eaton and offers full-time and part-time individualized programs for children and teens in Kindergarten to grade 12.

The typical EA student has average or above-average intelligence, but suffers from academic or social learning difficulties that make functioning in mainstream classrooms challenging.

"Parents considering EA are searching for a program that will address their child’s specific learning challenges and underlying neurological weaknesses,” Eaton says. “Families often come to us after trying several other methods without getting the results they hoped for.”

But deciding when to take a child out of the mainstream school system can be difficult.

"We waited until our son had finished elementary school to enroll him full-time," says Grant Brown, the parent of a former EA student. “We wanted him to finish the elementary grades with his friends. But after the first year at EA, we wished we'd moved him sooner."

Eaton believes it’s never too early for a child to start strengthening his or her brain.

"As an educator, I'm a believer that early intervention is better,” he says. “Otherwise, kids experience too many emotional scars from years of struggling and receiving negative feedback. The best option is to identify neurological difficulties as young as possible to give children time to strengthen those areas before they get older and school becomes more challenging."